Reading in Bed, With The Times Book Review

As the resident millennial among the preview editors — those of us who select and assign what goes into each Sunday’s issue of The Times Book Review — I tend to end up with any book remotely related to a “young-person” subject. (These might include: the Kardashians; cute dogs; “The Bachelor”; cute cats; pregnancies, planned or unplanned.) I take pride in having honed my high-low niche; absent the presidential biographies, big-name literary novels and academic histories my peers pore over, my bookshelf feels quirkier, a little irreverent, always stimulating.

So it came as little surprise when, back in August, a book landed on my desk with the title “Buzz: The Stimulating History of the Sex Toy,” and a cover that made subtle but skillful use of open- and close-parentheses to suggest female genitalia. (I promptly posted it to my Instagram story, dutiful millennial that I am.) Despite my initial skepticism, in the author Hallie Lieberman’s narrative I discovered a wealth of well-researched and thoughtful social context on the development of the self-stimulation device from antiquity to today. I presented it to the higher-ups and recommended a full review.

Shortly thereafter, my colleague Gal Beckerman came across another title he wanted to assign, “Vibrator Nation: How Feminist Sex-Toy Stores Changed the Business of Pleasure.” The pairing could not have been more obvious, and thus the seeds of what has now resulted in the Sex Issue — brilliantly christened “Pleasure Reading” by our editor, Pamela Paul — were sown.

You read that right: We stuffy book nerds have somehow let down our hair enough to put together an entire issue devoted to books about orgasms, porn, kissing, vibrators, bedroom fantasies, extramarital affairs and even teenage hookups. (On the other hand, it’s worth noting that we stuffy book nerds also think that what people are doing on Valentine’s Day weekend is … reading about sex.)

Inevitably, oversight of the issue fell by consensus to me, the lone 20-something. I have ever since been trying to pretend that, when it comes to sex, I have the slightest clue what I’m talking about. I started by pooling my resources, aggregating 50 covers of the most erotic books throughout literary history for the week’s visual back page, “Under the Covers.” (Please appreciate the word “seminal” on that page; it is one of my proudest career achievements to date.) The day that email went out revealed my impossibly erudite colleagues in a new light, instantly transformed as they were into giddy schoolchildren trading naughty jokes behind the teacher’s back. One by one the previewers revealed the steamy, guilty pleasures of their literary pasts. We’ve collectively done some pretty dirty reading.

The theme gave us greater leeway than usual both in subject matter and in reviewers. We doled out assignments to Cat Marnell, the author of the raw addiction memoir “How to Murder Your Life”; The Times’s Modern Love editor, Daniel Jones; Peggy Orenstein, the author of “Girls & Sex”; and Mary Jo Murphy, who writes our first column dedicated entirely to romance novels, a genre that has until recently remained somewhat distanced from the Book Review’s purview.

The real fun began once these pieces started rolling in — turns out it’s not so easy to compile a Sex Issue while maintaining The Times’s elevated house style. Some edits were obvious: As much as I admired Ms. Marnell’s rough-around-the-edges, colloquial and honest writing style, I simply couldn’t run either of the two “b” verbs she used as synonyms for intercourse. Less obvious was that I’d need to remove a detailed, explicit quote from the memoir she reviewed, “Getting Off: One Woman’s Journey Through Sex and Porn Addiction.” I had to paraphrase it at the expense, I felt, of the full force of both the book’s and Ms. Marnell’s prose. Mercifully, Philip B. Corbett, the paper’s standards and ethics arbiter, did allow me to keep the quote, “I came so hard I thought my heart would explode.”

“I can live with it,” he wrote to me in one of our several back-and-forth emails, “though it is kind of gamy.” Gamy, indeed.

The much-debated cover of the issue features individuals of all colors, shapes and sizes engaging in what looks like one big book-fueled orgy. “Why’s that one guy wearing a robber’s mask?” I asked when I saw it, before immediately kicking myself for letting slip my utter sexual naïveté.

With good humor and a dose of knowing mischief — the ingredients that characterize the entire issue itself — Pamela simply replied: “If you have to ask … ”

The Book Review’s Sex Issue is on newsstands Sunday, Feb. 11. Read stories from the issue at nytimes.com/books.

Keep up with Times Insider stories on Twitter, via the Reader Center: @ReaderCenter.

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